English Graduate Theses and ProjectsCopyright (c) 2016 Boise State University All rights reserved.http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj
Recent documents in English Graduate Theses and Projectsen-usSat, 01 Oct 2016 01:42:35 PDT3600Document Production for Technical Writershttp://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/5
http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/5Thu, 29 Sep 2016 15:14:59 PDT
Effective technical communication depends on the quality of the presentation as well as on the content. In fact, the presentation may very well determine whether the content is ever read or used. Each piece of literature—a sales brochure, set of instructions, technical article, company newsletter, or proposal—competes with a myriad of others. Catalogs, direct-mail solicitations, and newsletters fill the mailboxes—and often the wastebaskets. Those with an appearance that attracts attention and creates a favorable impression have the best chance of achieving their purposes.
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Becky Ann BeusA Project to Produce an Engineering Text for Publication: From Concept to Printhttp://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/4
http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/4Fri, 10 Jul 2015 13:00:14 PDT
This project to produce an engineering text for publication grew from two documents produced by Brent Keeth, a design engineer at Micron Technology, Inc. The first is a basic circuit design paper for a directed study course at the University of Idaho; the second, a thesis on a similar topic for a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Idaho. From these documents, Mr. Keeth and his advisor, R. Jacob Baker (who is now an electrical engineering professor at Boise State University), created a DRAM text for engineers at Micron entitled, DRAM Circuit Design: A Tutorial. Seeing its popularity on-site at Micron, Dr. Baker submitted a proposal to IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc.) to publish a book from this tutorial for circuit design academics and practitioners. My work on other projects for Mr. Keeth recommended me to the position of copy editor and illustrator of this text, which was published by IEEE Press in 2001.

High-speed design became key to circuit design in the early years of this century. To stay current, Dr. Baker and Mr. Keeth began work on a revision of the DRAM book. This time, two additional authors-Feng (Dan) Lin and Brian Johnson-were included, and eight additional chapters were written. My role remained the same, although now, working with four authors—one of whom is not a native English speaker—I found it difficult to produce a coherent, cohesive volume.

I used JoAnn Hackos' publications-development life cycle [1] to develop a document production process for the text. The life cycle includes the following five phases:

Information planning

Content specification

Implementation

Production

Evaluation

This paper presents the details of each phase in copyediting, illustrating, and formatting the revised text. The product of this process is a highly technical, camera-ready, 421-page book authored by four engineers over a span of seven years and including 272 hand-drawn figures. The book, DRAM Circuit Design: Fundamental and High-Speed Topics, was published by IEEE in 2008.

The paper concludes with a brief discussion of lessons learned from the project and an analysis of what went well and what could have been improved.

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Mary J. MillerCreating a Community of Composers: A Wiki as a Collaborative Writing Spacehttp://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/3
http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/3Wed, 21 May 2014 11:09:28 PDT... an increasing number of communication technologies mediate the way that we understand the modern world, and as such, we can no longer consider literacy to be solely about the business of reading and writing. --Natasha Mayne, from "Re-Vision: Why Media Studies Does Not Mean the Death of Literature"

How It All Began...

The roots of this humble project date back to two classes I took in the fall of 2007 as a graduate student at Boise State University. In Heidi Estrem's seminar for English teaching assistants, I was introduced to the idea of a wiki as a space for teacher/student collaboration. In the class, graduate students who were teaching English 101 and 102 in the 2007-2008 school year posted their course descriptions, writing assignments, lesson plans, etc., to our class wiki in order to share ideas and collaborate in teaching. I found the wiki tremendously helpful for finding teaching ideas and for sharing lesson plans with other graduate students. In Tom Peele's Fall 2007 Advanced Nonfiction Writing class, we explored the concept of digital literacy and the importance of using technology as a pedagogical tool to make our classrooms relevant in today's techno-savvy world. For a class project, I decided to design a wiki for use in two first year writing classes that I was teaching at the time. This research project is the story of how that first wiki sparked a fundamental change in how I teach composition.

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Samantha Archibald MoraImplementing Audio Consultations in the Writing Centerhttp://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/2
http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/2Tue, 20 May 2014 09:05:06 PDT
The Boise State Writing Center exists not because writers cannot write; it exists because writers do write. The Center—one of many such writing centers at schools across the country—started conducting tutorial sessions in 1980; its goal is to meet the needs of writers in the Boise State community, a community at a metropolitan university with currently over 19,000 students ("Facts" 1). Each year the Center conducts approximately 3200 sessions—the majority are face-to-face—with writers from every discipline, college, and writing level.
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Zachery W. KoppelmannBorrowing Avid Inquiry: Getting to the Essential Question in the English Classroomhttp://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/1
http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/english_gradproj/1Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:27:42 PST
There is a danger as new teachers struggle with how to implement their educational theories in the classroom to fall back into teaching how they have been taught, regardless of whether or not that method is appropriate to their beliefs or considered best-practice. In order to combat that tendency, this teacher-research project was designed to problem-solve the often-times conflicting relationship between curriculum and theory that all too often results in fall-back teaching. But also, this project aimed to collect and analyze student work in order to better inform instruction in a way that was both reflective and active. Specifically, the context of this project was a student-internship in a ninth grade English classroom in Boise, Idaho where intern, Kaidi Stroud, and mentor, Sarah Veigel explored the instructional benefits of teaching students how to question texts, rather than simply respond to texts. This specific instructional intervention evolved from an exploration of a new district-wide program, AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), and utilized Costa’s levels of questioning and Bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive skills (AVID Center, 2008). The findings indicate that providing direct and explicit instruction on this questioning framework promotes critical literacy, debate, responsibility, and higher-level thinking in students.
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Kaidi R. Stroud